TIPS FOR PARENTS
- Consider counseling, the parent, cannot resolve the issue on your own.
- Contact the administrator of the school, or the school district administrator responsible for attendance or truancy. Learn the school district’s supervisory chain of command, and try to resolve the problem at the level closest to the student involved.
- Contact the local juvenile court that manages the truancy petition process. Determine how your youngster’s situation fits the attendance and truancy policies and procedures.
- Create a contract, set some boundaries, and make it more worth his while to go to school.
- Seek other parents or older kids who are willing to help you and your youngster with homework. Make your home the homework center or develop a telephone tree to make help available to all neighborhood kids and their parents.
- Discuss with your youngster the reasons she has been truant.
- Don’t arrange homebound teaching.
- Don’t ask for a change of teacher or classes.
- Don’t excuse your youngster from school.
- Don’t focus on your youngster’s anxiety.
- Don’t tell your youngster that he/she does not have to participate in school activities or does not have to attend school at all.
- Drop your youngster at school in the morning and watching him enter the building.
- Understand what your youngster is expected to learn at each grade level. Contact your state department of education, school district, or school for a copy of the standards and school attendance policies. Find out what goals your youngster’s teacher has for the year and how your youngster will be graded.
TIPS
to get your child to attend school on a regular basis:
- Ask your youngster her thoughts on truancy.
- Take an active interest in your kid’s schoolwork. Ask them to demonstrate what they learned in school.
- Look for early signs of a youngster’s decision that school is not worthwhile. Monitor changes in friendships, teachers, or classrooms.
- Regularly contact the school office to make sure your youngster is attending school. Check in with his or her teachers on a regular basis. Make random visits to your youngster’s classroom to observe.
- Encourage your youngster to take an active role in the school by joining clubs or participating in sports.
- Teach them when and how to ask for help.
- Ask your youngster how you can help.
21. Encourage your youngster to develop outside interests.
22. Get support for yourself.
- Give the consistent message, “You will go to school.”
- Have consistent expectations. Relaxing the rules for even one assignment or day can give a mixed message. Make sure that all your kids live up to the same standards.
- Investigate what's going on at school. If it's an issue of bullying, parents need to find out what's really going on. Once parents know whether the youngster's complaint is a valid one, it's easier to work with the youngster around the issue, both in and outside of school.
- Maintain your routine. Stick to a regular schedule for homework, bedtime, and waking up.
- Make it less fun to be at home. If your youngster knows he can sit at home and play video games during the school day, the incentive to stay home is greater than the incentive to be at school.
- Make school relevant. Push for activities where students can take part in their own learning by developing projects to address community needs.
- Look for negative behavior changes such as alcohol use or staying out late. Seek a counselor if your youngster’s behavior becomes, distant, withdrawn, anxious, depressed, delinquent or aggressive.
- Obtain a copy of the district's policies and procedures regarding attendance and truancy. Attendance and truancy information is often contained in the student conduct section of a district’s policy manual, and is likely to be found in the Student Handbook issued by many schools. Some school districts place their policies on their Web sites.